The boys in the basement lack the polished white grins of the sharks they feed. Because they're too busy keeping the ship of state from going belly-up. Just give the grey suits a gold watch at quitting time and they won't build a superhighway through your living room. ACM Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. First and largest international scientific and educational computer society in the world. Stiff upper lip of SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH et al. ANSI Online American National Standards Institute. Private, not-for-profit membership organization that coordinates the U.S. voluntary consensus standards system. Who dots the "i"s and crosses the "t"s for America. IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc. World's largest technical professional society. So serious about being serious they devote one issue a year of their journal to technical communication. ISO Online International Organization for Standards. Worldwide federation of national standards bodies from over 100 countries. Headquarted in Switzerland. Like you thought we were going to say "Burma." W3C In the beginning was the World Wide Web Consortium. Led by Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web at the Conseil European pour la Recherche Nuclear (CERN) near Geneva in 1994, the consortium develops common standards for web development.